Re: (OPINIONS) How long do you think PS Home has left?

I've known Sony for a long time, first started back in 1999 with SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) with their game called "Everquest". Sony's first MMORPG, a milestone was set 400k users playing throughout the world. The problems users faced varied. Long wait times, mind you these were still the days of dial up internet.

Home for the PS3 may be coming to an end soon, all things must end, but there will be a replacement, the phoenix rising from the ashes so to speak. Home will just evolve into something else. Their work on Everquest taught them many things. Home was the New evolution.

Many people have said over the years the World of Warcraft would be dying. Well that hasn't happen either. I would not see PS Home as the end just another step to another virtual world. As technology changes, so must the software. Can't live in the past so to speak. Always moving forward, so yes, Home will eventually be retired, but there will be a replacement. It's how technology work.

I am sure those creating and working on Home have learned much. More so on, what not to do, or next time Lets do this better. You need something to reflect on so you progress and grow. Becoming better in the long run, and hope not be worn out and calling it quits.

Re: (OPINIONS) How long do you think PS Home has left?

:^/ Given that one of the biggest emphasises on their announcement for the PS4 was for its social aspects -built-in support for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.- it'd be silly for Sony to drop Home and its existing userbase.

Mind you, the PS4 offering my differ form the current Home somewhat, but I suspect that the basic idea will carry over. It'd also be cool, but not a given, if all or most of our accumulated crap carried over, too. But maybe that's asking too much of it.

So much depends on the numbers of course. If home has been a social experiment for consoles I would say it works and I would try to find a way to bring somethings from it to the PS4. How much depends on so much more than that though.

Re: (OPINIONS) How long do you think PS Home has left?

I believe Sony has been preparing home for the launch of the Ps4. Lately a huge step, was the cloud service, which pushes everything to their servers. The Playstation 4 will give the home devs a lot more growth in development. Having more memory and better graphics will push home to further potential.

As for all purchased items I foresee this being carried over to the new console, when you so choose to. I also strongly believe Sony will keep the home servers for the Ps3 up for a few more years. However they will only host the servers, not allowing many updates to cycle through.

In conclusion no one can really predict what will happen with home. If Sony decides to can years of development and a playstation exclusive, they are not thinking clearly.

Re: (OPINIONS) How long do you think PS Home has left?

Some time closer to the launch of PS4, a similar service will be announced for the PS4.

The service will be up and running at launch, but PS Home will continue to operate for several months after the launch of PS4, so they can sell a targeted number of units before pulling the plug on Home, so that all the focus can go towards the new service.

the rest of the while games will still be made for ps3, & home may continue onward for better or worse, I'm guessing there may even be a separate improved home for ps4 which will carry-over a complete inventory tied to the current home account.

But the catch might be if you switched an account to ps4 home you couldn't go back to using it with a ps3 account, so you might not want to anyway if it would be improved as much for example to be able to have 500 or more slot items in apartments, clothes looked better & had wrinkle animations from gravity or dancing effects, & other animations were active like a wetness effect from being in or around water. Some people might leave when the ps4 comes out, & they might be back. Either way my guess is that home will be around for years, if not I'll find my own other online community to get back to .

Re: (OPINIONS) How long do you think PS Home has left?

Personally, im waiting to see what they have to say at E3 this year. If Sony makes no mention of Home by then...I wouldnt expect it on the PS4, TBH.

I wouldnt be surprised if they did can it. After all, noone thought Sony would ditch backwards compatibility...and they did. They try to sugar coat it by saying "well, we still have all your older games on the PS Store and a lot of them are even being remastered in HD, with trophy support." But it's still not the same as popping in your old PS2 disc and firing it right up.

Point is, Sony has made some bold moves before in the past...dropping Home could very well be on their agenda.

BUT if thats the case, woulldnt they be telling all the Home Devs? Sony: "Hey LKWD, NDreams, Granzella, etc...just a heads up, we just thought you guys might wanna know...were cancelling Home. Your support is no longer needed or required. You have till this fall to release the rest of your content and pull out, before we shut the servers down forever. Have a nice day. -Sony"

If Sony was shutting Home down....why would they forfiet a loss of money, income, profits and revenue from Home and the virtual content and the community? Sony: "Oh, thats just an extra $5 grand a month (made up figure purely for examplative purposes) that we dont need anymore, yeah lets go ahead and get rid of all that."

If Sony intended to shut Home down anytime soon....why put all Home saves on the servers? Why not let us continue to save our content onto our HDD's? Why the migration? Seems like an aweful waste of time, energy and resources to be doing all that...just for nothing.

If Sony intended to shut down Home....what would happen to GlassWalls and the rest of the Home staff? Would they all just get fired, relocated to another project, laid off? These people need to work and feed their families too, dontcha think?

So theres just too much here to suggest Home will be around for a while. We just dont know HOW and in WHAT WAY. Will it be a direct "as is" port to PS4? Will it be redesigned and reinvented? Will it still be a Beta? Will it be re-titled and go under a different name on PS4? Will everything you bought on Home carry over to PS4 Home? Too many questions, not enough answers....

Idk how theyre gonna do it, but im confident that Home will be on the PS4 in some way or another. Just a little over a month left till E3.

We should all find out "everything" by then, given the PS4's launch date to be this fall, this year. They really dont have the time to be stalling on the info. I noticed it didnt take Mark Cerny too long to post the PS4 specs and detail the horsepower of the machine. Info on the UI, system features, console design, console support, etc...will ALL start at E3 and keep trickling down untill the end of the year when PS4 launches. Although revealing ALL at E3 would be nice, tho. LOL

I'm A Shadow. One That No Light Will Shine On. As Long As You Follow Me....You Will Never See The Day.

Re: (OPINIONS) How long do you think PS Home has left?

Sony's new direction is not only super efficient but worlds apart from PH's concept of what Home should be. When Home was in it's infancy how the world handled social or virtual media was completely different, too.

What we got was a bold idea in itself - a virtual world for gamers that have never been introduced to such an idea before, or the social norms of that environment. They had to adapt to a market of users they previously thought were not important or their target market. Truth be told not many gamers like virtual worlds. They carry a lot of social stigma in that community. Home is the butt of all jokes in gaming journalism as much as we like it. So all the content that was being developed with gamers in mind didn't sell as much as say the LKWD stuff did. That means they've had to develop new business strategies to keep or make Home profitable. This is why we don't have full-on gaming content in Home or better launch support.

2005 in terms of social media was also very different from today. A lot of the things we'd like to see on Home would take a lot of reworking and development costs, los of time, lots of money. At this stage it would be a huge undertaking to make Home the integral communications app it was hoped to become on the PS Network. It's cost a lot of years and money already. At the same time it's earned a loyal fanbase in 5 continents. So what do Sony do? They slowly make Home more cost efficient to run, improve its stability to appease partners, those loyal customers and slowly get them ready for a new product that is not only more capable than Home but in line with Sony's new direction.

You've seen some of the changes already over the years and very recently!

*A new method adding content or features to Home which is again, more cost efficient.

*Layoffs of core staff, with a shift in objectives for the remaining staff.

*A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT social experience on the PS4 from what Home is.

*Home being confirmed as "not a priority" from up top.

*We hear less and less about Sony's sales figures for Home. We've never heard if Home has actually made a profit, ever. Now we don't even know what they're making on Home period!

What could this all mean? In likelihood they want Home to pretty much run in auto pilot with a skeleton crew at the helm until every contract expires and they're ready to pull the plug. After 2013 Digital Platforms staff and SCE staff will have 5 platforms to contend with - PS3, PSP, Vita, PS4, mobile/desktop. That's a LOT! 3 of those 5 platforms hold the keys to future social interactive experiences whereas the other 2 are not up to the job. Mike Cerny in the Feb 20 conference himself said there was a lot they wanted to do with the PS3 in that respect but they couldn't. This leads me to believe Home will continue to exist on the PS3 but not on the PS4.

Home is NOT the future, it's the past. Home was the experiment, and we were the guinea pigs. What we get on the next platform won't be like Home but will have some of its best qualities.

We'll be given a chance to live in the past for a couple more years, or as long as our wallets foot the bill enough for them to keep it open. Regardless if this happens or not I'll continue to enjoy the Home we have now and whatever it is they bring to the table with the PS4 I'll lap that up as well, even if it means leaving Home behind.

Jersquall: Any new news on Home on PS4 yet?

Tempest_Fire: Due to a shifting landscape, PlayStation Home will cease publishing new content on November 12, 2014.

*A new method adding content or features to Home which is again, more cost efficient.

*Layoffs of core staff, with a shift in objectives for the remaining staff.

*A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT social experience on the PS4 from what Home is.

*Home being confirmed as "not a priority" from up top.

*We hear less and less about Sony's sales figures for Home. We've never heard if Home has actually made a profit, ever. Now we don't even know what they're making on Home period!

Sound and reasonable observations, and I tend to agree with your analysis of the situations and POV.

I still hold out hope that someone high enough at Sony will still recognize the potential that Home still has (although it seems to be shrinking every week) and will bring in new leadership and turn things around. Like making Home more user friendly and more options that let people customize their experience in Home.

For instance;

Improve the Navigation menu so spaces are easy to find. Like Organize spaces by developer, by genre, as well as alphabetically.

Improve Item Menus so we have better control of where items are placed, especially an additional storage folder that isn't just a spill over.

Improve Inventory Menus by having seperate folders for Companions and LMOs, and even seperate folders for different types of LMOs, like Mounts, Dances, and Gestures.

Improve avatar save slots so that instead of loading all 24/48 saves before using them, have multiple folders with only 12 saves per folder so that they load faster and allow each users to organize avatars by folders.

Add option to allow users to make other people's LMOs and even their avatars disappear from view.

Improve the Shopping menus so stores are easy to find and items can easily be found.

Add a search option for items in stores.

Include video previews for LMOs, Companions, and Active Items.

Include image previews of furnishings to show their actual size compared to an average avatar.

Allow users more creativity and freedom in their personal spaces. Like bringing back the old targeting system or include an option to be able to target all items in s space no matter where you are. And include a "float" option when placing items. It is after all a virtual world, real world physics already do not apply with many of the things in Home, so gravity should be an option as well.

Allow for more members to be signed up for a club than can fit in a club at one time, this way members can simply wait until there is room, rather than forcing the owner to spend their time constantly deleting and adding new members throughout an event.

Allow users to belong to more than 5 clubs.

Finally, to once again see Sony promote Home with Home rewards in their games and promotional events.

Even if they did some of these things I am confident it would help attract old users back to Home and draw in new users as well.

Sony's PlayStation Home updated mission statement...

"Like it never happened"

- Stand for something better than mediocrity and don't disguise it as adequate, when clearly it is far from that to anyone willing to be objective and unbiased. -

Re: (OPINIONS) How long do you think PS Home has left?

Sony's new direction is not only super efficient but worlds apart from PH's concept of what Home should be. When Home was in it's infancy how the world handled social or virtual media was completely different, too.

What we got was a bold idea in itself - a virtual world for gamers that have never been introduced to such an idea before, or the social norms of that environment. They had to adapt to a market of users they previously thought were not important or their target market. Truth be told not many gamers like virtual worlds. They carry a lot of social stigma in that community. Home is the butt of all jokes in gaming journalism as much as we like it. So all the content that was being developed with gamers in mind didn't sell as much as say the LKWD stuff did. That means they've had to develop new business strategies to keep or make Home profitable. This is why we don't have full-on gaming content in Home or better launch support.

2005 in terms of social media was also very different from today. A lot of the things we'd like to see on Home would take a lot of reworking and development costs, los of time, lots of money. At this stage it would be a huge undertaking to make Home the integral communications app it was hoped to become on the PS Network. It's cost a lot of years and money already. At the same time it's earned a loyal fanbase in 5 continents. So what do Sony do? They slowly make Home more cost efficient to run, improve its stability to appease partners, those loyal customers and slowly get them ready for a new product that is not only more capable than Home but in line with Sony's new direction.

You've seen some of the changes already over the years and very recently!

*A new method adding content or features to Home which is again, more cost efficient.

*Layoffs of core staff, with a shift in objectives for the remaining staff.

*A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT social experience on the PS4 from what Home is.

*Home being confirmed as "not a priority" from up top.

*We hear less and less about Sony's sales figures for Home. We've never heard if Home has actually made a profit, ever. Now we don't even know what they're making on Home period!

What could this all mean? In likelihood they want Home to pretty much run in auto pilot with a skeleton crew at the helm until every contract expires and they're ready to pull the plug. After 2013 Digital Platforms staff and SCE staff will have 5 platforms to contend with - PS3, PSP, Vita, PS4, mobile/desktop. That's a LOT! 3 of those 5 platforms hold the keys to future social interactive experiences whereas the other 2 are not up to the job. Mike Cerny in the Feb 20 conference himself said there was a lot they wanted to do with the PS3 in that respect but they couldn't. This leads me to believe Home will continue to exist on the PS3 but not on the PS4.

Home is NOT the future, it's the past. Home was the experiment, and we were the guinea pigs. What we get on the next platform won't be like Home but will have some of its best qualities.

We'll be given a chance to live in the past for a couple more years, or as long as our wallets foot the bill enough for them to keep it open. Regardless if this happens or not I'll continue to enjoy the Home we have now and whatever it is they bring to the table with the PS4 I'll lap that up as well, even if it means leaving Home behind.

I think this is the best comment I have read about the future of Home...

Of course non of us outside of Sony really knows what's going to happen,,, but Ed's comment pretty much uses what little information is out there and blends it with his opinion that strikes a chord of common sense both business wise and consumer wise...